Avalanche Resources

This post collects resources from the community to (hopefully!) help the several-hundred recently laid-off Avalanche employees find new positions, start new studios, or go indie.

Our hope is that these talented folks can stay in the industry and stay in Utah, and not have to uproot their families and move cross-country just to find work.

This outreach is an initiative of the Utah Games Guild in the interest of preserving, and hopefully strengthening, the Utah game dev community. (Here’s Utah Games Guild co-founder Josh Sutphin on why local still matters.)

A "living document" version of this information is available here for anyone to contribute to.

Indie dev project looking to add a senior engineer to a talented core team. We’re acquiring funding for a project to start in June. Email tyler@revolvstudios.com for details.

Local Game Companies

Don’t hesitate to send these companies your resume/portfolio, even if their current job listings don’t include your position. The Disney layoff may represent an opportunity for them to hire hard-to-find talent that isn’t explicitly on their roadmap yet.

Pixel Prospector - The Indie Goldmine. All-in-one site containing links to tons of other resources useful for going indie and game development in general.

Starting a studio

The best possible silver lining to the closure of Avalanche would be the formation of some exciting new indie startups in Utah. Starting a company seems daunting to many people, and there are some developers who simply prefer the security of working for a large established company. That security is illusory anywhere in the entertainment industries, however, as we’ve unfortunately just seen demonstrated.

Consider this: the hardest part of starting the next Valve or SuperCell isn’t the logistics, legal work, or fundraising — it’s assembling a great team. This usually takes years, because each new hire requires finding the right combination of talent, personality, and ambition to fit your vision for the company. So if you have a team of Disney co-workers with whom you already gel, whose talents you trust and admire, you have already accomplished the biggest hurdle to building the next great game company.

Legal

One of your first steps will be to actually create a legal entity for the company. You can register your company in Utah using this website:

You’ll need to consider practical things, like healthcare and making sure you have business insurance.

Office Space

Working from home can be great to get started, but it isn’t ideal for teamwork or collaboration. Most landlords require big commitments for office space - multiple year leases and security deposits. You’re probably not ready for that right away, so consider an incubator (if you’ve seen Silicon Valley on HBO, this is the idea, but not someone’s house!).

There are a few local incubators where you can rent desks and facilities by the month, secured by a credit card. It’s a really cheap and effective way to get started. Other advantages include professional meeting rooms where you can meet investors or clients, high-speed internet, a real street address, business services plus there are other startups just like you with whom you can share or even collaborate.

Here are a few to consider; each has a slightly different mission and vibe, so check them all out to see who has space and which will be the best fit for your needs:

Advice From Local Experts

There are a lot of decisions you and your business partners will need to make at the outset. How will the company be funded? What roles should each of the founders play? Are we going to create a new original game, or focus on contract work for other companies? What are the major strengths of the team, and how do we best leverage them?

Unless you’ve done this before, it can be very helpful to have the advice of people who have. UDEN is a great resource for this. Here are a few UDEN members with experience founding companies in Utah that are willing to advise new startups:

Coping When You Are Let Go

It’s tough being let go, and you will feel a range of emotions. You will worry. You will feel sad. You will think that maybe you will never get a job again! This is all quite normal. But you will be OK. Be prepared, know what you will be going through, stay active and sooner than you know you're starting your next job. That might be a week, a month, six months, maybe more. So it is important to get a plan together really quickly.